I came across a column today by Anne Applebaum, one of the most well-informed, fair-minded writers you can find. She’s particularly knowledgeable on issues and history regarding Eastern Europe, Russia, and the former Soviet Union. Her Gulag: A History, which won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2004, is by far the best book I’ve read on the cruel Soviet prison camps, and I’ve read many, including all of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s.

So, seeing a column on climate change by Anne Applebaum got my attention. The first paragraph is poignant indeed:

There is no nihilism like the nihilism of a 9-year-old. “Why should I bother,” one of them recently demanded of me, when he was presented with the usual arguments in favor of doing homework: “By the time I’m grown up, the polar ice caps will have melted and everyone will have drowned.”

The goings-on at the UN’s Copenhagen climate conference have pretty much degenerated into just another effort by third-world countries, most of them led by corrupt authoritarian politicians, to fleece the rest of the world. There’s also a studied effort to ignore the ClimateGate scandal; some of the world’s biggest polluters, including China and India, are refusing to do anything significant to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions; the conferees are hoping that as the Kyoto Protocol dies they can at least get an agreement to reach an agreement at a future conference, and the President of the United States is going to present an emissions reduction target that his own people don’t support and that the Senate would probably never ratify. Meanwhile, the carbon footprint of the conference itself is equivalent to that of a small city, as pooh-bahs and grandees fly in and out in their private jets and zoom around the city on shopping trips in their hundreds of limousines. In other words, business as usual.

What Applebaum highlights — and we don’t think about it very often — is the psychological impact that true believers have on normal people, including children. Its no secret that many of the most fervently religious believers in global warming (or climate change or climate shift, whatever they’re calling it today) think that the real threat is humanity itself. Pessimism and doomsday threats permeate their thinking and their pronouncements.

Meanwhile, normal people, like Applebaum and most of the rest of us, can see that we need to protect the environment and reduce energy consumption, but we wonder where the proof is that would justify the extremist solutions we’re urged to accept. She wrote,

I’m … disturbed by the apocalyptic and the anti-human prejudices of the climate change movement, some of which do indeed filter down to children as young as 9. … As for nihilism and hatred of humankind, it teaches us nothing, except to give up. And we shouldn’t be passing that on to our children either.

After I read the column, I was standing on my balcony watching the snow, which has been falling since last night. Snow at this time of year in Belgrade isn’t unusual, but we also had snow in early November, and that’s very early. I took a photo for you just because I think snow is beautiful, and I hope global warming doesn’t mean we won’t have it any more. But that seems unlikely.

In the distance, on the left, you can see a large building through the falling snow. It’s a major hotel which has been under renovation for years, partly because the U.S. (OK, NATO, but you know what that means) bombed part of it in 1999. Except for the snow, you could see the Danube River just beyond the hotel.

Speaking of wagging the dog, if I had panned the camera about 30 degrees to the left (and if I could see through the building next to mine) I could have taken a picture of the Chinese Embassy about 250 yards away that the U.S. bombed in 1999. I took the photo you see on another snowy day a couple of years ago. When we attacked the Embassy, we killed three Chinese diplomats and wounded others. It was a mistake, we’re told, but I don’t know. I still have a tourist map of the city from 1998, clearly marking the site as an embassy. In any case, the Embassy is still an unoccupied hulk, as are a number of other large buildings the U.S. bombed in the heart of Belgrade.

The thing is, we didn’t agree with what Yugoslavia was doing inside one of its own provinces, so we bombed the hell out of parts of the country, including Belgrade and its people. That was the first time Belgrade had been bombed since World War II. In fact, it was the first time any European city had been subjected to aerial bombardment since World War II. But what the heck — anything to take the pressure off Bill Clinton’s “domestic” problems.

Anyway, that’s where my mind was today — the psychological impact of global warming hysteria on children, the farce in Copenhagen, the snow falling outside, and the bombing of Belgrade. They’re all interconnected, somehow….

7 Responses to “Climate Doom, Snow, Bombing”

Yes,we,too had snow and for the second year in a row,very unusual,indeed. Something is amuck,but what? I would never,never advocate telling such a horrible thing to any child. To give up,in any case,would be incredibly ignorant and not even a decision that should be out there. I do,however,think we should be open minded to climate change and all it could mean.The idiot who scared the children was wrong,the idiot who has an open mind to all possibilities and protects the fragile environment,is not too much of an idiot,n’est pas?

Alot of the propaganda gets down into the school systems where well-intentioned teachers put the info out to the students. Oh well, we don’t need to worry about it because 2012 is just around the corner. Isn’t the world going to end? I imagine the kids are even more worried about this one!

Tom – You are correct, the attitude of nihilism and uselessness is very difficult to fight off at times. Not helped by movies like these, which of course are not designed at all to give small children the idea that climate change is inevitable, imminent and devastating.

This was the movie showed at the opening to Copenhagen. No scaremongering here. As JXIIH said in the Golden City, “First you tell them a frightening story. Then you give them a happy ending.”

I’ve been having some trouble these last few months myself; not because of the climate, but because of our economic situation. Six months ago my life seemed to be going so well; it still is, really, but I often have to fight off an attitude of “What’s the point of getting this work done, the country’s just going to melt into economic chaos in 5 years anyway and then what will be the point of all this aerospace nonsense?” The only problem with fighting this attitude off is that I consider that scenario a lot more likely to happen than the ice caps melting and flooding the world.

Thanks for the links, Brianna. The strongarm treatment of the journalist is about what you would expect. The UN film, which I hadn’t seen, is really disturbing. This is the kind of propaganda that radical teachers are spoonfeeding children all over the world, to include in the U.S. They do this at the expense of real education.

Here’s an interesting example of media propaganda. According to an AFP report,

US President Barack Obama is hoping to push through a new deal after the United States — the world’s biggest economy — rejected Kyoto under his predecessor, George W. Bush.

Here’s the truth: Vice President Al Gore signed the Kyoto Protocol on behalf of the U.S. in 1997. However, the Senate had already passed a resolution by a vote of 95-0 saying that they would never ratify a treaty like that. So, President Clinton never submitted it to the Senate. President Bush, who had his own problems with the Protocol, simply did the same thing President Clinton did — he never submitted it to the Senate for ratification. President Obama also hasn’t submitted it to the Senate, claiming it’s too late because we’re already in the four-year commitment period. Or maybe because the Senate would smack him down, like they would have Clinton or Bush.

Michael Crichton has spoken eloquently for me and many others. Despite his partisan detractors, his work and his research have held up well.
Even if you don’t agree with his conclusions (bad politics and pseudo-science), the bibliography stands alone as a well documented critique of the global warming/climate change debacle.

Thanks for your comment. I read Crichton’s State of Fear and had the same reaction. I’m in the camp of the global warming skeptics — I’d like to see the environment better protected and reliance on foreign oil reduced, but I don’t see the case for inflicting severe economic hardship.